As the world becomes more and more connected, our products become smarter and the challenges facing manufacturers get bigger. The promise of a digital transformation—complete with digital threads, digital twins, and integrated systems—means companies can save time and resources while making better business decisions and getting products to market faster. Starting that transformation is often the biggest hurdle, but a recent webinar and paper from CIMdata and Razorleaf can help.
“The Integration Imperative: Enabling a Connected Digital Thread,” a webinar combining CIMdata’s expertise in strategic management consulting and Razorleaf’s experience in PLM-focused systems integration, delivers the essential considerations for creating digital threads. Systems integration is the core need, but there’s no one-size-fits-all approach, because every company’s systems, data, and processes are unique. While the webinar is product-agnostic, a follow-up paper from CIMdata, “CLOVER, An Advanced Digital Thread Platform,” reviews a platform that can make it happen.
Integration Enables Digital Threads Enables Digital Webs
Peter Bilello, President and CEO of CIMdata, introduces the criticality of integration, saying, “If you want to digitally transform, it’s about gaining a better level of efficiency, about streamlining processes, but it’s ultimately about creating, managing, and using your digital assets, your information assets.” This means every bit of data in your company related to any step in the lifecycle of your product. He then shares CIMdata’s “critical dozen,” the 12 important trends and enablers for digital transformation CIMdata has identified as being frequently overlooked by companies worldwide.
Peter walks through the critical dozen, spending the most time on item six: Digital Thread/Twin, which he says are grouped together because one without the other doesn’t make sense. He goes on to explain that what companies are really working with is something more like a digital web—a network of digital threads as well as a network of decisions about a product. He says, “The digital web is an integration of information sets that cut across organizations, processes, and solutions.” The best way to get started is to figure out what digital threads you need to achieve what specific purposes for your business.
Designing Your Integration Strategy
Jonathan Scott, Razorleaf’s Chief Architect, steps in to address the practicalities of the integration required to build digital threads, webs, and twins. Four areas, Jonathan says, “need your attention if you want to recognize value from your digital thread”: process, people, data, and technology.
- Process: You should start with identifying the use cases that will help you justify the digital thread you want to build out, because they’ll give your organization immediate benefit. From there, figure out how your company will change current business processes as a result of digital threads, what else you might want as use cases in the future, and how those future desires or needs might also change how your business operates.
- People: “We need to think about how people will access the digital thread. If we ask ourselves those questions about how, that seems to answer the most fundamental piece regarding people in the digital thread,” he says. You also need to consider, who else besides your internal workforce might access digital threads, how to make them ready to use it (e.g., training), and how to give them the skills they need to use them, but also to maintain, evolve, and build your digital threads.
- Data: The most important aspect of data, Jonathan explains, “Is you need to have a good understanding of the character of your data to be able to integrate it effectively.” Then you must understand what kind of data you’re dealing with, how good and consistent the data is you want to integrate (i.e., garbage in, garbage out), and how you’re going to both fix quality problems and enhance areas of your product dataset.
- Technology: According to Jonathan, this category isn’t the least important, but it’s last because it’s so often the only item companies focus on. His key point is to not build out a digital thread using generic middleware. “Find something with built-in capabilities, which can still be configured and customized, is scalable and which you believe will be capable of extending beyond its original design,” he says.
Watch the Webinar Replay
If you are considering how to enable a digital thread in your organization, this webinar is definitely worth a listen. Peter Bilello lays out the framework of what an organization needs to consider, and Jonathan adds some context to how that framework gets applied along with the key things to consider when making decisions around estabishing the various threads in your enterprise.
Be sure to watch the full webinar or reach out to Razorleaf for questions about how to start your own digital transformation.
